Page 43 of Brutal for It
The room tilts again. The moth on the ceiling beats its wings taunting me. The noise around me gets loud, then far. Someone is talking about a game on Saturday. Someone is looking for their phone. Someone is asking me a question, my body answers because that is what bodies do when minds can’t.
I keep breathing. That’s my job now. In, hold it for a second, out. The same row boat on the same black water, only now the oars are hands I don’t recognize and the shoreline is a rumor in the far distance I can’t see.
Another dip into the bag. Another ugly mercy.
I am not brave. I am not noble. I am not anything but a person who made a choice and is trying to make it to the other side of it. I keep my eyes on the stain on the ceiling. I let the moth be a sky again. The room door opens. The door closes. Shoes squeak. A zipper. The bathroom faucet. Ice in a cup. Voices like radio static. The bed creaks.
Time doesn’t move forward, it folds around me, consuming me.
It doesn’t hurt, not in the way people think. That’s the cruelty. Pain would make a boundary. Numbness has no edges, and so I slide into my own oblivion.
I think of the beach and the woman with the blade for a mouth. Trash stays trash. I tell the ceiling that I am not trash, that I am a person making a terrible choice in a room full of them and that tomorrow I will choose differently. The ceiling does not answer. The moth doesn’t move.
The last man leaves and the room exhales. The handler steps inside and looks at me and then looks away because even he has a threshold, which enrages me. He could do this and still not look?
What did he expect to see? I had how many men put their cocks in every hole on me they could find except maybe my ear even though I swear one of them may have tried because there are remnants of the men left in my hair, on my breasts, between my legs, down my thighs, on my back, between my ass, and pretty much all of me except a few inches of one leg. Their release left as evidence of what I allowed them to do to me.
He picks up the bag and weighs it with a glance. “Good,” he mutters, to the air, to his ledger. “I’ll settle in the morning with what is left of your cut after what you’ve used.”
Money. That’s what first light will bring. Money and a new bill immediately afterwards—a room charge, a debt, a wardrobe, a different kind of quiet. And me, caught between promising myself a miracle and breaking in ways that don’t make sound.
He leaves. The door clicks. The lock turns. The chain slides.
Silence, real this time, not the kind the body buys. I am alone in the room with the last thin smear of escape and a bed that doesn’t care who sleeps in it.
The promise returns. If I make it through this night, I will go back. I will sit in the back row and not look up when I say it: Hi, I’m Jameson Rivera and let the room say Hi back. I will let the fluorescent lights be church and the coffee be communion and the truth be something heavier than shame.
I whisper it like a vow. It lands on my lips and stays there, shy of anyone else’s ears.
I lie down because there is nowhere else to go.
The ceiling stain turns back into a moth and then into nothing at all. The room lurches in a way that is not the room. The softness dips toward black, then pulls up. Dips again. I ride it because what else can I do? The body wants what it wants; the heart wants what it wants; the part of me that wants to see daybreak wants everything.
The window is a dark square that could be another life. The curtain shivers when the AC kicks on, a weak, brave thing trying to look like wind.
My pulse stutters. A cold slide moves under my skin, not the nice kind, not the float. The kind that says the line I walk can disappear. My hands tingle and then go far away. The room stretches and snaps, stretches and snaps.
Stay, I tell myself.
Stay, says the wall.
Stay, says the bed.
Stay, says the promise.
The last thing I think, before the world lowers over me like a lid, is small and enormous at once: If I live through this, I will choose the light. Please let there still be light to choose.
The dark comes on soft. Not a door slamming—more like the tide coming in the midst of a hurricane. It’s all fury and fight above it, but underneath always rolling in ever steady. For a second, I float. For a second, I am thirteen and twenty-three and thirty-three and none of those numbers matter because I am just a body trying not to disappear.
Then everything narrows to a thread.
Then the thread thins.
Then the thread snaps.
Then the room goes very, very quiet.
I don’t know if the next sound I’ll hear is morning. I don’t know if the next face I’ll see is mercy or the brutal truth of how low I have fallen again.
